Honor among thieves

Chapter Nineteen

The bridge across the river Strow began and ended within the walls of the outer bailey. No one crossed the river without the king’s approval-at least, not from above.

Underneath the bridge a complicated sparwork of stone beams held up the road surface. An agile man unafraid of heights could cross from one end to the other without having to climb up top.

Malden had both those qualities. It didn’t bother him in the slightest to hang from his hands by a stringcourse of granite, thirty feet above the foaming waters of the river. Velmont and his crew took their time about it, but managed to make the crossing without slipping. Yet when Cythera began to climb across, she made it a third of the way and then stopped, clinging hard to a stone pillar, her eyes clenched tightly shut.

Malden looked up. He could hear horses drawing heavy loads across the timber surface of the bridge. It creaked and rattled under the strain. He swung back over to where Cythera waited and put an arm around her back. Slowly, unwillingly, she opened her eyes and looked at him.

“This is your stock in trade, isn’t it?” she asked him in a very small voice. “I thought I would be fine. I’ve been on rooftops before, climbed towers-”

“This is different. I understand,” Malden said in a soothing voice. He looked across the underside of the bridge and saw Velmont staring back at him. The Helstrovian thief made a pushing motion with both hands.

Malden tried not to take offense at the notion. They were, in fact, pressed for time. Dawn was only an hour away and they needed to be outside the walls by then, outside and well clear of the eyes of Helstrow’s kingsmen.

“Take it slowly. Don’t look down,” he said.

“I can’t move my arms. They won’t let go,” Cythera told him.

Malden fought down the impatience and fear in his heart. He thought of what he should say. He couldn’t very well carry her across. Perhaps he should coax her on like a stubborn mule, or a frightened child, or — no. This was Cythera. She was no blushing virgin, afraid of specters in the privy and spiders in the basin.

“You are the daughter of a sorcerer and a witch,” Malden said.

“I can’t magic my way over there!” Cythera shouted at him. Her voice was nearly lost, all the same, in the rushing of the water. She looked down. “If I fall from here, how far do you think my body will be carried by the current before I wash up on some distant bank, my lips blue, my eyes cloudy, my bones shattered by rocks?”

“You are the daughter of the witch Coruth,” Malden said again. He was sure he was on the right track. “You went willingly into the Vincularium. You fought demons and elves and undead things there. This,” he said, carefully, “is a very sturdy bridge. Stonemasons work tirelessly to keep it from falling down. Now. Come with me. I expect you to follow my every step.”

Then he turned away and jumped to a ledge of stone no more than three feet away. With one hand on a beam for support, he used the other to gesture for her to follow.

And she did.

Moving carefully, one step at a time, they swung across the beams, jumping where necessary, walking sideways on thin ledges, always moving forward so momentum helped carry them along.

Cythera did not fall.

At the far side, a thick pipe stuck out from under the bridge. It drained the dungeons and cellars of the keep into the river. An iron grate covered its end, but Velmont already had that unlocked and pulled back on its hinges. Inside, they had to crawl a ways before coming to a wider space. It was so dark, Malden felt the blackness pressing against his eyeballs. He reached back, and Cythera took his hand.

This was the perfect place for a betrayal. If Velmont wanted to kill him, it could be done with no trouble at all.

Instead the Helstrovian made fire and lit a torch. Malden saw that they had come to a junction of many pipes, some no wider than his fist, some high enough to walk through. “Smugglers use this route all the time,” Velmont explained, gesturing at one wall. Hundreds of marks and sigils decorated the bricks, names and columns of numbers scratched into the niter-thickened stone of the walls. It looked like whole generations of thieves had been through this way. “There’s an outflow pipe what fetches up at the base of the outermost wall, just o’er here.” He pointed down a broad pipe that led away into darkness. Malden started to lead Cythera toward its mouth, but just then Velmont grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

“Your Cutbill,” he said, “had better come through for me and mine. I ain’t leavin’ behind e’erything I ever knew, just to end a beggar in some piss pot o’ a free city.”

Malden nodded but said nothing.

Not long after, they pushed open another iron grate and stepped out into moonlight. Above Malden’s head the wall of Helstrow stretched high. He was outside it, out in the country beyond the king’s fortress. Free.

Looking up he could make out lights among the battlements. There were guards up there, keeping watch. They’d crossed an important barrier, but this was no time for exultation. Not yet.

Velmont extinguished his torch and gestured for him to keep moving. The outflow pipe emptied in a narrow ditch that ran straightaway from the fortress town. Malden didn’t look back until they were a quarter mile away. Then he looked to see lights burning in the keep and palace, the sealed gates of Helstrow, and the empty villages that stood outside each portal. No lights there-the people who lived in those villages had all been herded inside the walls, either for their own safety or so they could be conscripted.

He saw Velmont looking back, too, and wondered if Velmont had ever in his life been beyond that wall before. It could be a terrifying experience, first setting foot in a countryside of which you knew nothing. Malden knew-until his recent adventure, he’d spent every day of his life in Ness, and the first time he left, it felt like he’d been picked up by a great wind and thrown out into the middle of the sea. He’d never quite gotten used to country life.

“In a few months,” he told the Helstrovian thief, “the war will be won. You’ll return richer than when you left-and you’ll like Helstrow all the more for the money you bring back.”

“Assumin’ your barbarians don’t stink my city up too much, after they turn it into one o’ their tent camps.” Velmont’s face contorted through a variety of emotions. “There’s a piece of me-not a big ’un, mind, but a piece-wishes I could stay to see what’s goin’ to happen.”

“You want to remain here and fight for your home?” Malden asked, a little surprised. Thieves as a rule were not known for their patriotic sentiment.

“Nah,” Velmont said with a chuckle. “I kinda wanna stay and watch it burn.”